Food, glorious food! It does not take much to make a man happy. Just give him a bagel for breakfast, maybe pizza for lunch, then, a heavy steak dinner with some mushrooms, cantaloupes and watermelon fruit on the side. If you have money, however, you can have the real costly versions of all these food. Here now is a list of the top 10 most expensive foods in the world.
10. Mattake or Matsutake Mushrooms –$1,000The mattake, or matsutake, mushroom is the most expensive mushroom in the world today. This is a highly coveted mycorrhizal mushroom that can be found in Asia, North America and Europe, particularly in Japan, China, Korea, the United States, Canada, Finland and Sweden. The most popular is the one associated with the Japanese Red Pine. It is usually hidden under fallen leaves on the forest floor. While simple to harvest, it is extremely hard to find. The annual harvest in Japan is less than a thousandtons only.9. Westin Hotel Bagel – $1,000It may just be a bagel, not that different from what you usually have for your breakfast. Then again, this creation of Frank Tujague, the Executive Chef of Westlin Hotel in New York, includes a small amount ofwhite truffle cream cheese and goji berry-infused Rieslingjelly that has golden leaves. The price busteris the truffle, as this Italian fungus is one ofthe most expensive food items in the world.8. Zillion Dollar Lobster Frittata – $1,000Omelettes are so easy to cook.All you need are some eggs, along with any other food that you wish to use as an ingredient.In Le Parker Meridien Hotel in New York however, the restaurant called Norma’s took a giant leapforward by adding lobster claws and 10 ounces of Sevruga caviar into six eggs. The result is thethousand dollar omelette, or as the restaurant has advertised it, the zillion dollar lobster frittata. A scaled-down version featuresonly 10 percent of the caviar. Asonly an ounce isincluded, the restaurant only sells it for $100.The full version of the frittata has been sold only about 12 times, while the smaller version is ordered around 50 timesa year.7. Craftsteak’s Wagyu Ribeye Steak – $2,800Wagyu beef is a sought-after item because ofits high percentage of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Its genetic predisposition also allows it to have an acceptable ratio of monounsaturated to saturated fats. The best ofthe lot is the onefrom Kobe, raised in the prefecture of Hyogo in Japan.The cows raisedhere are fed with beer and are massaged regularly to ensure tenderness. A full Wagyu ribeye in Craftsteak in New York was once served for$2,800. The restaurant is now closed, however, and replaced with Colicchio & Sons.6. Bombay Brassiere’s Samundari Khazana Curry – $3,200As the world was dancing toNicole Scherzingerandthe rest of The Pussycat Doll’s “Jai Ho (You are My Destiny)” while celebrating the success ofSlumdog Millionaire, Bombay Brassiere decided to create a curry dish fit for winners ofWho Wants to be a Millionaire?Devon crab? Check. White truffle? Check. Beluga caviar in gold leaf? Check. There are also gold-coated Scottish lobsters, four abalones, and four quail eggs filled with even more caviar.5. Domenico Crolla’s Pizza Royale 007 –$4,200Domenico Crollais a Scottish chef known for putting portraitsinto his pizza creations. He decided to create the Pizza Royale 007, though the producers of theJames Bondfilms did not commission it. It was a 12-inch pie, filled with lobsters marinated in cognac, caviar soaked in champagne, tomato sauce, Scottish smoked salmon,prosciutto, venison medallions, and vintage balsamic vinegar. To top it all, there are 24-carat gold flakes. They are not to be taken home, however, as they are edible.4. Densuke Black Watermelon –$6,100Black watermelons are rare items, especially the Densuke variety that is only grown in the island of Hokkaido in Japan. A harvest will typically yield only a few dozen fruits. What makes it special, aside from its rarity? Its hardness and crispness are just perfect, plus, the level ofsweetness is just incomparable. Afruit that weighed 17 pounds once went for $6,100.3. Yubari King Melons –$22,872No, these are not the ordinary cantaloupes that you can find in the supermarket. The orange-fleshed Yubari King melons arecoveted because of its proportion and sweetness. These items areso in demand that auctions are actually conducted for its purchase. In 2008, over 100 melon fruits from Yubari were on the block. The most perfect of all was the first item put on sale.A businessman who owns a souvenir shop and seafood lunch restaurantmade a bid of nearly $23,000 for the honor and privilege of taking home that particular fruit.2. Almas Caviar – $25,000The Almas caviar is an extremely rare food item from Iran. Caviars arealready expensive to begin with, but the rarity of this item makes it even more expensive. As a matter of fact, even finding a store that sells it is like looking for a needle in the haystack. The only store known to carry this item is the Caviar House & Prunier located in Picadilly in London. The store packages the caviar on a per kilo basis and places it in a tin made of 24karat gold. Selling price is$25,000. If you want just a tasteof it, then a smaller tin is sold for $1,250.1. Italian White Alba Truffle –$160,406Truffles are expensive items, but none as dear as the Italian white alba version. These items have become difficult to cultivate, thus explaining the exorbitant price.A huge white alba truffle that came in at around 1.51 kilograms was once sold for over $160,000. A retail investor from Hong Kongand his wife brought home the truffle.

Here’s one of my favourite neologisms: “hangry.” It’s a punning portmanteau. To be hangry is to be angry because you’re hungry; a phenomenon that plays an intriguing role in Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 guide to behavioural economics,Thinking, Fast and Slow.As a battery of experiments cited by Kahneman demonstrate, your decision-making differs profoundly depending on how long it has been since you last ate. According to a 2011 paper by psychologists Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, the likelihood of a prisoner being paroled by a panel of judges declined from a perky 60 per cent immediately after breakfast to a perkless zero per cent just four hours later – only to be boosted right back up again by lunch.It’s a stunning statistical divide, and one the judges themselves had little capacity to predict. Yet the causes are close to common sense. Hungry people are more likely to rely on mental short-cuts, emotional impulses, and default states when taking decisions. In this case, leaving prisoners locked up is a safe default position. High quality attention of the kind that permits us deliberately to change our minds is, the authors observe, a limited and easily depleted resource. Even the most skilled thinkers have only so much to spare.What does this have to do with education? Ask a teacher facing the day’s final class on a cold Friday and you’ll get your answer: tired and hungry pupils have precious little capacity for learning. Proper nutrition and decent sleep are vital to performance. But there’s also a larger point at stake, and it’s one Kahneman makes the centrepiece of his narrative: “you think with your body, not only with your brain.” There is no such thing as a human mind existing distinctly from a human body. The workings of the body arealso those of the mind. And, given what weare beginning to know about some of these workings, many traditional aspects of schools and classrooms are something of a disaster.In the 19th and early 20th centuries, education saw itself as a civilising discipline, imposing physical stasis and mental focus on pupils who would otherwise be running wild. In the 21st century, an age more sedentary than any that has come before, the mission of taming wild young minds is a colonial anachronism – and yet more emphasis than ever is put on unmoving intellectual absorption.Consider some of the visions of educational progress offered online for ourdelectation. Search for “the classroom of the future” and you’ll be dazzled by digital possibilities: technicolour seating with tablets for all, massive projectors and interactive whiteboards, virtual and augmented reality environments, live videolinks, and telepresence beamed across theworld. As some companies boast from the vantage of their labs, what’s on offer is “a truly personalised environment” in which “the classroom will learn you,” providing “a tailored curriculum from kindergarten through high school and toward employment.” With teachers backed up by “sophisticated analytics over the cloud,” what could be better?At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, what strikes me is the degree to which the little human beings within this scenario don’t much resemble the intractably embodied creatures psychologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers are spending so much time getting to know. Instead, they’re digital marketeers’ dreams of a quantified learner: a pair of eyeballs and ten disembodied tapping fingers, hooked up to as much relevant information as possible, from now until theend of time.However a series of disembodied minds hovering in rows before an interactive whiteboard with sustained inattention are likely to be met with a diagnosis of ADHD and a methylphenidate prescription. Playtime is an indulgence steadily reducedas age increases; physical education constitutes two or three hours a week of grudgingly allocated time in which ‘proper’ learning is not taking place. Assessment isexhaustive and constant. Great teachers may run lively, passionately questioning classrooms, but this is often despite ratherthan because of the incentives surrounding them.In philosophical terms, education’s approach to body and mind resembles a view that has been intellectually disreputable for over a century: dualism. There is the stuff of the mind and the stuff of the body, and never the twain shall meet. Physical needs are largely there to be overcome; physicality itself is an unwelcome distraction from the business of knowing.For the philosopher of technology LucianoFloridi, writing in his 2014 book The Fourth Revolution, “the exponential increase of what may be transmitted has caused a major crisis in how we conceive education and organise our pedagogical systems” – but this isn’t so much a crisis of how as of what. “The real educational challenge,” says Floridi, “is increasingly what to put in the curriculum, not how to teach it.” Gadget fixation is part of the problem, not the solution. In an age of exponentially increasing information, the intelligent allocation of time and attention matters most – together with helping students develop matching skills of self-management and discernment.I have two young children and I watch them learning every day. My son learns what most words mean not by hearing them on the television or radio, but by using them while doing everyday things with people who love him. And he learns the power and the fertility of language by twisting, turning, playing, laughing, taking a delight in throwing words at his parents and seeing how they react. We read, play, laugh, explain, explore. To be idealistic, thegreat enabling conditions of his learning are time, attention, love, and permission. To be pragmatic, he needs to run around a lot, sleep and eat well, engage loudly with people and ideas, and be shouted at and told to sit still as little as possible.Education in the 21st century, Floridi notes, isn’t just about preaching certainties. It “should teach us to be careful about what we think we know, and hence the art of doubting and being critical even of the seemingly certain. We are all fallible, it is how we handle our degree of fallibility that makes a difference.” Behavioural economics and cognitive science offer some of the best insights yet into handling fallibility – into offsetting the predictable irrationalities that are the stuff of bodies and minds. Yet we sometimes seem to be retreating ever further from the implications of such self-knowledge.To quote Daniel Kahneman once again, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” Dualism is a seduction we cannot afford when it comes to education: a disembodied dream of perfect predictability and precision-engineered feedback. We are messy, embodied, inefficient, fascinatingly fallible creatures. We must learn to live with – and to teach –ourselves as we actually are

“The image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it. If nine-tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things were spent in seeing that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.”John Dewey, from the pamphlet My Pedagogic Creed, published in 1897.How important is formal education for a child’s development? Apparently a lot, if you consider the amount spent on sending children to private schools.In Britain, private schooling for 14 years costs parents £286,000 (USD$400,000) per child, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Educating a child in an Australian private school costs much the same (USD$411,000); in the US or Canada tuition fees for one child will add up to around USD$300,000. It’s clear that private schooling today is a hefty outlay, even for the rich.But the type of instruction children receive during the day is playing a less significant role in their overall education, according tostatistics from Nielsen.The research firm reports that while children in the US spend 900 hours a year immersed in the school curriculum, a total of 2,500 hours each year are spent studying the media curriculum – including1,500 hours examining the television. In other words, the media is by far the leading educator of children today.The media’s standardised content does not discriminate between rich and poor, giving all children an equal start in life. For instance, by the time the average child finishes primary school they will have watched over 8,000 murders on television. By age 18, thanks to media school, a young adult will have witnessed 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence.In addition to murders, another compulsory subject for children is sex. Two out of three television shows include sexual content, and over 58 per cent of youths aged 14 to 17 report having seen a pornographic website.“Between the ages of three and eighteen, the average American youngster will see about 500,000 television commercials, which means that the television commercial is the single most substantial source of values to which the young are exposed,” writes Neil Postman in The End of Education. Washington University notesthat 100,000 of these advertisements watched by US teens are likely to be advertisements for beer.So it seems that alcohol, sex, and murder are the subject majors for children studying the media curriculum. Before the advent of television and the Internet, violence, drug abuse, murder, and random sex acts were witnessed only by children of the unfortunate few: those from drug-addicted homes or violent neighbourhoods.Today, all children major in these topics – regardless of how their parents bring themup or how much of the family fortune is invested in school fees.

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